


Vivacissimo

by feralphoenix



Category: Homestuck
Genre: End of Act Five: [S] Cascade, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-25
Updated: 2011-10-25
Packaged: 2017-10-24 23:18:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/269000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You don't shed what it is you are; you simply become <i>more.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Vivacissimo

She lost grip of the individual minutes and seconds, but what she will never forget for as long as her soul exists is the sensation of pain in every cell of her body—the long and excruciating straining of the molecules of her from this existence to the next, utterly without mercy—

            and then

                        the moment

                                    in which all pain stopped,  
                                    in which her lungs were suddenly free of blood,  
                                    in which all the world was clear blue and she was made from

                        _f i l a m e n t s  o f  l i g h t,_

                                                and the world breathed in and out with her,

and in that moment the pain and the abandonment and disappointment and confusion just stopped mattering, because the sky and the sun were hers and she and the beauty all about her were one and she _knew_ she would never be all alone ever again.

 

 

It was quick and easy: It was the quickest and easiest thing he had ever done, putting his trust into the hands (the mind) of another and falling soft and deep.

The memory is vague, but somewhere in the middle of dreams,

there  
was a soft  
bright kind of  
_inexplicable_  
_warmth_  
at his  
chest

and then he was awake in an unfamiliar place with an odd distant sort of attachment to the bloody body the clouds were showing him; a sudden intimate knowledge of the way the air held him; and a quiet, complete lack of any fear whatsoever.

 

 

For her it had been a thing foretold: For all of her life since she had arrived by meteor onto her now-dead planet, she had been a cog, a single little gear in a great mechanism as delicately arranged as the silver-and-copper guts of any one of her music boxes. She had expected it. She allotted herself the specific time to say one last farewell to the one who needed it most, but then when the time came—

Between the sudden detonation and the ugly fires that tore her soul and her freshly wakened body in two separate directions, there was a quite unexpected

_twist_

like a broadening of horizons, and then she realized with a great brilliance that she had come free of the machine, from its chrysalis: and there was a fierce kind of joy that bloomed in her thin breast and upon her face at the knowledge that never again did she simply have to bob along on the currents of fate like a good little buoy in its tethered line.

She was _free,_  
she was above the tide,  
she was _master_ of her element now,  
and she would never be going back to the way things had been.

 

 

The game had torn her into pieces very slowly and culminated in the awkward halving of her into the side overwhelmed by despair and the side clinging to the back of indignation like a mechanical bull: Spinning, spinning, sent off in separate directions to separate dooms, never to reunite.

But it was just so sudden, in the end, that she had no idea what had happened to her until

_she was whole again;  
_

and then she knew—she understood—the great scientific equation of the path before her had shaken itself into clarity as the sides of her melded, and she _laughed_ with the power at her fingertips, and the surety in her heart, and danced the whole world into place.

There was still one tiny sliver left in the cage of despair and fate, and she would grasp hope through it on the course _she,_ and no one else, had plotted.

 

 

 

She didn’t have to be the one sitting at a computer screen highlighting the word _Suckers_ to know that there was much, much more to this situation than she had been privy to, but it was too late to back out and so she stood on the golden bed of rock and turned and looked at him, just looked at him, and he looked back at her because there wasn’t hope after all, because they had been played and because it was too late and because there would be no demarcation of who should be the martyr and who the guilty survivor—

And then the explosion

            and a sensation much like melting

                        and then— _and then—_ instead of breaking down—  
                        he with the sword in his hand  
                        and her eyes _cleared—_

and they rose up in one gesture to greet the smiling girl before them,  
because the path they had thought was closed had perhaps been open all along,  
and they too blind to see it.

There was still  
_(time)/(light)_  
and it was not for them to sink softly into the oblivion that was promised them.


End file.
